FINE TUNING
Fancy spending a nice sunny afternoon glued to the tube? This summer, a host of shows exploring TV, video, and film will offer strong inducements to stay indoors and avoid those ultraviolet rays. Between June 23 and August 30, Birmingham’s Ikon Gallery will be surveying three years’ work by Adam Chodzko, whose “authentic reconstructions” test the capacity of film and photography to substantiate the inauthentic or the hypothetical. Pieces like God Look-Alike Contest (photos of persons who feel they resemble the Almighty) or Solo Reunion (an attempt to reunite actors “massacred” in the eponymous Pasolini movie) will accompany new work. Film and telecommunications also make Pierre Huyghe tick. Last year, the French artist outfitted an art gallery with its very own TV transmitter. In Vienna this summer, he’ll exhibit entirely new site-specific work at the Vienna Secession; turn up and tune in between May 28 and July 18. At Zurich’s Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst from June 12 to August 15, newcomer Uri Tzaig will show site-specific video work map- ping questions of language and communication onto Swiss mountain landscapes. Meanwhile, in Colombia, a retrospective of video artist Antonio Muntadas’s work goes on view August 25. Best known for File Room, in which acts of artistic censorship are exposed via the Internet, Muntadas is preparing a new interactive installation for the retrospective at the Biblioteca Luis Angel Arango, in Bogotá, on view until October 31.
The earliest experiments in sound recording were partly inspired by the desire to preserve for posterity the voices of the dead; the spookier dimensions of electronic sound and vision will be invoked in various shows this summer. In Bern, Switzerland, “Pixels, Prints, Pigments” (August 18-October 31) will unite the Kunstmuseum and the Museum of Communication in a semidangerous digital liaison. The show aims to relate “live” and “dead” media in a variety of unexpected ways, using Paul Sermon’s digital imaging piece Telematic Vision as spirit medium. At London’s Delfina between June 28 and July 4, Psi Girls, a new video installation by connoisseur of the creepy Susan Hiller, will parallel the cinematic and the telepathic. And Hitchcock fans will spot the auteur in much more than a walk-on role at the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford ( July 11–October 3). Part exploration of such Hitchcockian themes as voyeurism, fetishism, violence, and memory, part one hundredth birthday party, the show will contrast work by Douglas Gordon, Cindy Sherman, and others with clips of the master’s films.
Meditations of a different sort will be proposed by that paragon of abstract painterly restraint Callum Innes at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, in Dublin, between June 22 and September 12. New paintings by Innes will accompany selected earlier works, as part of the museum’s “New Projects of International Art” initiative. Spiritual malaise, on the other hand, may well be the seasonal specialty in Turin this summer. At the city’s Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo per l’Arte, curator Francesco Bonami rounds up the usual YBA suspects for “Common People: British Art between Phenomenon and Reality” (June 13-September 10), a show that aims to link the UK’s later-’90s stars—Richard Billingham, David Shrigley, and others—back to their ’80s precursors, including Damien Hirst, Angela Bulloch, and Sarah Lucas. Recommended cure for the YBA summertime blues? Exit the gallery, and have an ice cream.
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DREAM ON
Some, it appears, enjoy a bit of navel gazing—especially if the navel in questions happens to be Mariko Mori’s. Her Dream Temple, on view through June at Milan’s Fondazione Prada, includes a 3-D video component representing two years’ worth of research and development. If recent Prada exhibitions devoted to the likes of Louise Bourgeois and Sam Taylor-Wood are any indication, Mori’s effort will be staged with museum-quality finesse. The cost? Don’t even ask. It might disturb your karma.
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COUNTRY LOWDOWN
Trellis, anyone? Go gazebo gazing at the Witte de With, Rotterdam, between June 19 and August 29: A total of eleven large-scale installations by Fortuyn/O’Brien will be on show. Featuring nine existing pieces and two creations, the exhibitions will offer a comprehensive overview of Dutch artist Irene Fortuyn’s stylish investigations into Western landscape design and the domestication of nature.
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CONSTRUCTIVE ZONE
T-squares at the ready, compasses akimbo, Constructivists Luibov Popova, Natalia Goncharova, Alexandra Exter, Olga Rozanova, Varvara Stepanova, and Nadezhda Udaltsova will be found near the banks of the Spree this summer. “Amazons of the Avant-Garde,” at Berlin’s Deutsche Guggenheim (July 10–October 3) promises a welcome review of the paintings, drawings, designs, and radical concepts of these pivotal early-twentieth century Russian artists.
